A pattern in which someone organises their functioning around another person's dysfunction, and thereby sustains it.
The term moved from addiction counselling into general use in the 1980s and expanded until it covered most forms of concern for another person. Attempts to operationalise it have not produced a stable construct, and it does not appear in diagnostic manuals. What it names is recognisable; whether it is one thing is unresolved.
In practice
- A colleague who repeatedly covers for another's missed deadlines is removing the consequence that would prompt change.
- A label that can be applied to almost any act of care is not distinguishing anything.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is learned accommodation: in a household organised around one person's crisis, the behaviour that keeps the peace is reinforced daily. Another is role: caring for someone in trouble supplies purpose and standing that are hard to give up.
- In its favour
- Clinicians and people in recovery report recognising the pattern, and family research documents accommodation that maintains a relative's symptoms, particularly around addiction and anxiety.
- Against it
- Attempts to measure it have not produced a stable construct, it appears in no diagnostic manual, and critics argue that it pathologises ordinary caregiving and has been applied disproportionately to women.
- Standing
- Clinical researchers have not established it as a construct. It has no agreed definition, no accepted measure, and has been criticised for pathologising ordinary caregiving and for being applied almost exclusively to women. Retained because it circulates very widely.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop